I believe that this audit is a bad audit. (hm, for some reason it now says someone else reviewed and passed it, but I failed. maybe because I typed this question before pressing "I understand," so it got passed on to someone else. anyway,) The question text was:

No, no. The audit. What did the audit ask?
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Robert HarveyOct 3 '13 at 2:35

@RobertHarvey You mean the fail message? The usual "STOP! Look and listen" one
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DoorknobOct 3 '13 at 2:35

"Should this question be closed as ...." ?
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Robert HarveyOct 3 '13 at 2:36

2

@RobertHarvey Ah, it said "primarily opinion based," but I wanted to close for a different reason anyway so I clicked Close.
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DoorknobOct 3 '13 at 2:36

Worth noting: according to the timeline for the question, it never attracted a close vote, and there are no downvotes on the question. The other reviewer chose "Leave Open."
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Robert HarveyOct 3 '13 at 3:12

@gnat: So 7 people thought the question was good enough to upvote it, and none of the 139 who viewed it felt the need to vote to close or flag. Are you saying they're all wrong?
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Robert HarveyOct 3 '13 at 12:52

@RobertHarvey how many of these 7 / 139 thought it was also good for review-audits? "Test items in review queues that are designed to help new reviewers hone their moderation skills, while nudging more experienced users that don't seem to be paying close attention to what they're reviewing." Are you saying all of them thought so?
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gnatOct 3 '13 at 12:56

@gnat: It's not reasonable to expect voters to consider how their vote might affect some obscure algorithm in the SE software.
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Robert HarveyOct 3 '13 at 13:26

1 Answer
1

While it's true that the vast majority of questions that I close under "Questions asking for code must demonstrate a minimal understanding of the problem," or "Problems with code must include a description of code that reproduces the problem and a description of the problem," those are not the real reasons why I actually close such questions.

Questions looking for code, or questions looking for a solution to a problem, aren't the real difficulties we have with the front page of SO. Rather, it's the vague, under-specified, unanswerable questions with atrocious spelling and grammar, copy/pastes of homework assignments, and so forth. The Eternal September, in other words. The new close reasons work so well because those questions are almost always absent the elements that we now require.

Here's the catch. Occasionally, someone posts a question who clearly understands what he is doing, states the problem clearly and succinctly, and asks a question that is definitively answerable and not an obvious duplicate. It's not a highly-obscure problem, nor is it something that requires a lengthy explanation to answer. But the OP has not posted his half-assed, broken code with the question.

Why would we close such questions? Isn't the point of Stack Overflow to serve as a repository for problems and solutions that are broadly applicable to programmers? Isn't it true that these kinds of questions, even though they might violate the letter of the law, certainly don't violate its spirit? Aren't these the kinds of questions that we want to see here? The kind that will attract genuinely good answers instead of attempting to fix broken code?

The question you have to ask yourself when you encounter a question like this during an audit, is this: Does the question actively harm the site if it remains here? I think the answer in this particular audit is clear.